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The air outside is crisp. You can see your breath and the end of your nose is red and cold. The houses that you pass have Christmas trees in the windows. There are lights arranged all over the front lawns. The stores are all lit up and twinkling. The bell ringers are sitting in front of the shops collecting your spare change for charity.

But it’s not a Christmas party that we’re going to tonight.

I’m sitting in a restaurant with my wife and my daughter. It’s not a fancy place. “It’s not the Shangri-La,” as I’ve been known to say in description of any place that doesn’t require a jacket and tie. No, this is just a hamburger joint.

We’re sitting in a booth enjoying big, fat cheeseburgers, shoestring fries, and ice cream sundaes. There is electricity in the air. There is a smile on my face. This is a special day.

At the table next to us there are two men about my age. They’re having a casual conversation about their work and if you just listened to the words you’d think they were in bus…

40 Movies For 40 Years: 1989

1989 was the year that I turned 12 years old. I was getting
to be the age where I was all in on films. I drove my mom crazy when I begged
her to buy me some magazine at the grocery store that cost $4 just because the
cover briefly mentioned a movie that I was excited about. We didn’t have 50
websites giving us up-to-the-minute details behind the scenes like we do now.
We got our news in spurts. So, if there was a tiny mention of something we were
into, we had to be on it.

It wasn’t plausible to get my mom to buy every magazine on
the rack at Food World. So, many Saturday afternoons saw me at the local
convenience store, sitting in the floor next to the magazines and comics,
reading what I could until old Mr. Smith told me to go home.

This is probably the hardest installment that I’ve had to
write since I started this project. There are so many movies from 1989 that I
love. And unlike a lot of the ones that I’ve written so far where my favorite
movie from a given year wasn’t discovered until years later…1989 was the first
year that I can remember falling in love with many of these films from the word
“go”. Some of them I had to wait until the following year to see them on video
because movie-going in my rural town was a pretty big outing and not something
that we did every weekend.

Why is it so hard to pick a winner for 1989? Because I love
so many of the titles that came out that year…especially in the summer. Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Back to the Future Part II, Honey, I Shrunk The Kids, Ghostbusters II, and even Look Who’s Talking.

See? See how hard that is to choose from? No? Well, then you’re
not a dude that’s about to turn 40. Because if you were my age…that’s some Sophie’s Choice level stuff right there.

So…I asked myself which movie from that year has meant the
most to me over the years. Did any of them shape the way that I watch movies?
Did any of them affect the movies that I love now?

This wasn’t the first comic book movie ever made. Several of
the Superman films had already beaten it to the punch. But it was the first one
that came out when I was of an age to care about it. I became a regular viewer
of Entertainment Tonight just hoping to get a glimpse of a costume or any breath
about the production. When the Batmobile was first unveiled it was the greatest
thing that I’d ever seen.

I wasn’t a huge consumer of comic books. I wasn’t the kid
that went to the comic book store every weekend and bought an armload of the
newest titles. I got an allowance of $3.50 a week. With that money, I went to
the local convenience store and bought four things. A Snicker’s bar, a Sunkist
soda, a copy of the latest Superman
title…and Batman.

The only exposure that I’d had to an on-screen version of
Batman up to that point had been the campy version from the 60s that starred
Adam West and Burt Ward. It was entertaining as I watched it in reruns. But
even as a kid I knew that Batman was supposed to be a darker character.

If you want to make a dark movie, Burton is the man for the
job. Although, at that point in his career that might not be as widely known as
it is now. At that time his claim to fain was directing Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. You don’t remember the genius that movie was
but you need to revisit it. It really was well done. But what he could do with
the visuals of this film given what he had to work with at the time was
incredible. There aren’t a lot of special effects here. We didn’t have CGI at
the time so most of what you saw was practical. They used real cars. They used
models. They built actual sets. And what we got was a very dark rendition of
Gotham City that looked like a comic book page had sprung to life on the
screen.

The film was out of time. It was assumed that it was set in
present day (of the time) since Batman had a lot of advanced tech to work with.
But the cars and the clothes looked like it was set sometime in the 30s. In
this way Burton created a universe that became synonymous with the Batman
franchise and was utilized in most of the later films. It inspired the animated
series, which I argue is one of the best cartoons that has ever been on TV.

One thing that I love about this film is that it is not an
origin story. So many times we’ve seen a film versions of comic book heroes
come along and we get a long drawn out story about how the hero came to be.
Sometimes we get that story over and over again in various films. But, Burton
didn’t want to make a movie about how Bruce Wayne became Batman. He wanted to
make a movie about Batman fighting the Joker. So, he took the origin that could
have been a whole movie of its own and broke it down to a short flashback
scene. It’s all that we needed. We got the whole story of Batman’s birth in
that scene that took less than three minutes. It was brilliant and it’s
something that I wish we could see more of today.

When Michael Keaton was announced as Batman, it went over my
head. My 12-year-old self didn’t know enough about Hollywood to care who was
playing the characters. I know now that it was a decision that was well hated
by a lot of fans. He was a comedic actor for the most part. But I think that he
did a good job in the part. He was an excellent Bruce Wayne. He was a little
less excellent as Batman. But that black rubber suit that they built restricted
his movement so I think he gave the same performance as Batman as anyone else
would have.

Jack Nicholson played the Joker. His performance is legendary.
He took the character that we knew from the comics and told us to forget all
that. He played Joker as a 30s-style gangster that lost his mind. He still wore
the colorful costumes and he still had a maniacal laugh, but he wasn’t jumping
all over the place and acting cartoonish the way we’ve seen before. This
version was much more along the lines of what we saw in The Killing Joke.

What we have today is a Hollywood that churns out comic book
movies like it’s all they know how to make. And I’m not complaining about that.
We get a lot of really good movies that way. The MCU hasn’t put out a bad movie
yet. But something they all have in common is that they depend greatly on CGI
to tell their stories. Batman didn’t have that problem. Burton proved that all
you need is a good concept, a decent script, and a great cast and you can make
a film that will be the template for a ton of others for decades.

And, it’s my favorite film from 1989.

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